Haggard: Infinitely bribable. The French are merely a nuisance. They’ve never forgiven the Anglo-Saxons for saving them. I don’t like Germans, but I greatly admire them. In fact, you’ll get a bottle of German wine for lunch.
NBM: Do you read detective fiction?
Haggard: The standard detective novel, what they call the cozies — Agatha Christie — I can’t read. And I cannot read what we call the “whydunits.”
NBM: Who are the authors of the “whydunits”?
Haggard: Julian Symons. People like that. The genre starts off by having a crime, tells you on the first page who’s done it, and spends the rest of it in amateur psychology, explaining he didn’t get on with his wife. If I want to read psychology, I want to read the hard stuff that tells you what it’s really about or what a good priest will tell you. They’re all laid in some dreary south London suburb. Some little man going into London every day on the bus throttles his wife because she won’t sleep with him or something. The thing becomes excruciatingly boring. They’re not crime stories at all. There’s no crisis, there’s no solution, there’s nothing. It just carries you through this chap’s mind and his relations with his wife, or his mistress, or his girl friend, or whatever. They’re all sex murders in one way or another. And I find them intensely boring. Of the current thrillers, I think Len Deighton’s good. I can’t read le Carré.
NBM: Why not?
Haggard: There’s too much angst in it. He’s an angry young man, or angry old man.
NBM: What’s he angry about?
Haggard: The world. And that’s too large a target. The way the world is run. He’s angry with the whole system. And it doesn’t do. Well, I’m angry with it too, but I’ve got to live with it. He appears to think he can change it. I know he can’t.
NBM: But his George Smiley is not all that far from Colonel Russell. Same kind of man, old-fashioned standards, doing the job, getting on with it, and battling the incompetents and frauds in the government.
Haggard: That is in fact what does happen.
NBM: If Colonel Russell really had power, if he were, say, a senior minister, what would he do?
Haggard: I must slip that one, because I can’t conceive him as a politician, at least not one under the democratic system. I mean, he might, just conceivably, start some — I hate the word fascist — organization, but I can’t see him working as a politician. In fact, I’ve always been rather careful to draw the distinction between what he does and what he's told to do, which is noticeable in several books when he bends the law at risk of his own head. But fortunately he gets away with it.
NBM: He doesn’t need the job, which helps.
Haggard: He doesn’t need it, no. He’s a man in comfortable financial circumstances, and therefore he’s prepared to take a chance and does. But I can’t see him as a politician. I don’t know what he’d do. I just can’t see him taking it on. I think he’d go mad. I’m sorry I can’t answer that. I’ve never even thought what he’d do. I certainly wouldn’t ever consider a book in which he was in a political job. Never. No, it’s not his cup of tea at all.
NBM: But you think it is at least conceivable that, given the proper inducements, he could join an extra-governmental political movement.
Haggard: Put it this way; I’m sure if Russia successfully invaded this country tomorrow, the first man they would employ would be Colonel Russell.
NBM: And he’d work for them?
Haggard: Oh yes.
NBM: Why?
Haggard: Discipline. The first people they’d shoot would be the intellectual Left. They’re all going to concentration camps, or, if they're lucky, going to be shot. But people like Russell… The hard Right has got much more in common with communism than the soft Left.
NBM: Colonel Russell and the class system or William Haggard and the class system. You uphold it?
Haggard: Oh yes, uphold it strongly, but I’m not a snob. I know which class I was born to.
NBM: Define snob for me.
Haggard: That’s asking something. Now in the old days it used to mean “climber,” roughly a man who sought the company of, or kowtowed to, those in a class above him. Now it appears to mean, as currently used, anybody who dares to admit that class exists. I know exactly what class I belong to. I belong to what we used to call the professional upper-middle class. I have no wish to be anything else. I’m not upper class and never shall be.
NBM: But the Colonel is, isn’t he?
Haggard: The Colonel, I suppose, is. Yes. He’s upper class, but I hope he’s not offensively so.
NBM: Would you say that the English upper class have betrayed their responsibilities?
Haggard: Not betrayed them, they’ve failed them. There was no act of deliberate betrayal, I’m sure.
NBM: Failure of character?
Haggard: There’s no drive, I think. After all, there’s a lot to be said for them. If you’re inbred as they are you can’t have particularly powerful genes. If you line-breed a dog… There’s a very common dog around here, hunt terriers — some people call them Jack Russells, but they’re not — and they are linebred until they become absolutely daft.
The upper class has been clipped of a good deal of power deliberately. The House of Lords now has no power at all. It’s a sort of old boys’ club. And all these life peers have been pumped into it because it’s a cheap way of pensioning off politicians. Because they get paid to attend, whereas proper peers don’t. It’s got no power over a money bill. It can hold up and it can send a bill back through the Commons. But if the Speaker of the House of Commons certifies the thing as a money bill, House of Lords can’t effectively touch it.
NBM: Would it be accurate to say that one of the things Colonel Russell does is uphold the class system?
Haggard: No. I don’t think it would. I’ll put it this way: He’s aware of it but has long since given up hope of changing the direction of the world. He mistrusts what the sillies call egalitarianism, which doesn’t mean a thing. I don’t think he’s conscious of his class at all; in fact it’s one of the nice things about him. He just is upper class and that’s all, as the nicer ones are. I went to a college at Oxford which was full of the upper class, and I wasn’t treated any different because I wasn’t.
NBM: Why should Americans read you? What will they get from your work?
Haggard: I suppose something about the decadent limey state. Because I do feel we are decadent. I may not be, but then I’m old. I’m finished.
NBM: Could it be that your work requires a greater knowledge of English society than American readers have?
Haggard: Yes. I like that question; I think you put your finger on it. Certainly a greater knowledge than the average inhabitant of Croaking Bull, Ohio, has. I don't imagine that I would play in Peoria. So I can’t imagine Haggard being read in Peoria. Why should they? It isn’t all that exciting; it certainly isn't notably sexy.
NBM: I’m sure that someone along the line has said to you, “Look, if you really want to sell your books, you have to put in some bedroom scenes.” What was your response?
Haggard: I may have been in a bedroom myself, but that doesn’t make me a good writer of bedroom fiction. Those blow-by-blow accounts of sexual intercourse bore me stiff. That’s something you do, not something you write about. What’s that chap called who writes bloody great blockbusters full of sex? Harold Robbins. I can’t read Harold Robbins, can you?
NBM: Why does le Carré sell in Peoria? Not because of sexual content.
Haggard: I can’t answer that. Well, he has a certain air of gravitas, which I haven’t. He’s much more solemn than I am. That’s why I find him rather a difficult read. I don’t share his view of life. He has the extreme Protestant ethic — that what counts is that you have to find your own way to God.